Will AI Become Your Delegate in Democracy?

A team of AI and sociology researchers at Renmin University of China (RUC) recently interviewed 92 residents of a Beijing urban community for two hours each, capturing migration stories, marriages, career turns, grievances about community issues. They transcribed these life-history interviews, then trained a small language model to answer governance surveys on behalf of those residents. The model gets it right about 50% of the time.1 They then deployed a live system where a residential committee can run the survey, generate a policy report, and revise the policy, without contacting any of the 92 people.2The team just published their research as a preprint. It’s an exploratory social experiment, but given its direct test on actual local democracy in Chinese society, community-level decisions on parking, elevators, property management. It could also become the very first experiment of a future model for social participation.Weekly essays on the ideas behind China, past and present.…